Higher Education

We are having issues with excessive numbers of users overrunning the captive portal on our controller and Aruba Tech Support has suggested we move to an external web server.  I have setup IIS and I have found documentation to configure the controller to redirect the user appropriately but I am not real familiar with the XML API programming and really just need an example of a page that displays the T&C and provides an 'Accept' button which will tell the controller to move the user to an authenticated 'guest' role.

Has anyone else dealt with this that could provide me some pointers or might have an example page they could share?

What were the symptoms you experienced, and how many guest users did it take to "overrun" the controller portal?

What model controllers, etc?

We are running a standalone A6000 controller with an M3MK1 supervisor card currently running 6.2.1.2.  The APs are all AP105.  We advertise two SSIDs, one Secure with an 802.1x login, and one Guest using an internal Captive Portal page which just displays a T&C page and an 'Accept' button.  Clicking that button authenticates the user.  

Using the 'show web-server' command, we were able to find that the maximum supported concurrent clients setting was set to 25.  We increased this number to 320, but unfortunately during peak periods we see associations to the guest portal as high as 700-800 simultaneous connections, thus the need to move to an external CP page.

and the symptoms are???

Only reason I ask is that we see approximately 1500 users every day connect through 3 M3's...we recently fixed our issue of users not being able to maintain an authenticated guest role after roaming and would be sent back to login role.

My apologies.  The symptoms are varied.  

• Some users will just experience extremely delayed access to the captive portal page.  Once they finally get the page and click 'accept', they will either timeout as they wait for a response or eventually successfully authenticate and redirect appropriately.
• Some users will just timeout waiting for any response from the controller.
• Some users will get the 10-second delay screen that is programmed in when CPU utilization is high.  Once that has counted down, they will either redirect to the CP page and experience one of the results above or timeout.

This only happens during peak periods.

This page here:  https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/HowTo/R-154 tells you how to construct that HTML page.  You would just put it on a different server but in the Captive Portal Authentication profile, you would enter the "Login Page" parameter to redirect users that page externally, instead.

No XML-API necessary.  The http(s) post logs the user in when they click on accept in that example.

Just to follow up, I was able to use an amalgamation of this document:

https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/HowTo/R-124

and the document provided above:

https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/HowTo/R-154

to achieve my goals.  The only adjustment I needed to make was in the html document provided in R-154 to adjust the form post action from:

<form name="form1" method="post" action="/auth/index.html/u">

to:

<form name="form1" method="post" action="https://<controllerIP>/auth/index.html/u">

And I additionally had to check the 'Guest Login' box in the Captive Portal configuration under L3 authentication to accomodate the HTML page provided in the R-154 example.  Hope this helps someone and thanks for everyone's help!